That’s not the only idea Inspire floats for al Qaeda wannabes. Got a pickup truck? Why not create the “ultimate mowing machine” by welding steel blades to the grill and driving up on crowded sidewalks to “mow down the enemies of Allah?”

But it’s “paramount” to target government workers, Ibrahim boasts, “and the location would also give the operation additional media attention,” according to our friend James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News. In other words, killing a lot of people all at once is less important than letting Americans — and government workers in particular — know they aren’t safe in their capitol city.

If anything, Inspire’s call to hit the Beltway lunch rush reinforces a tactical shift that security officials struggle to thwart. At a Washington conference on domestic terrorism last week, Sean Joyce, a senior FBI official, assessed that al Qaeda’s attempted operations on American soil “continue to evolve” in the direction of “small-scale, dispersed” hits like Faisal Shahzad’s failed Times Square car bomb.

Those attacks may not have the same destructive capability as 9/11 did. But since they involve few people and don’t require a lot of communications, they’re harder for law-enforcement and intelligence officials to detect. Shooting up a restaurant is much smaller-scale than what Shahzad attempted. But the D.C. sniper in 2002 was able to hunt locals for weeks before his arrest.

Don’t necessarily brown-bag it just yet. Anyone driving with blades on his truck’s grill is getting pulled over fast. As terrorists move toward more traditional criminal tactics, they may not be easy to find, but they’re playing on law enforcement’s traditional turf. And it can be hard to get a sandwich downtown without running into a Metro cop.

Inspire’s second issue confirms previous reporting that well-known American jihadi propagandist, Samir Khan, has become a writer for the online journal after fleeing to Yemen. Khan, a former extremist blogger, describes his journey from an amateur scribe in North Carolina to writing for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in an article for the magazine. The title: “I am proud to a traitor to America.”

“I knew that I had to stay under the guidelines of the laws regarding freedom of speech, but at the same time, I knew the real truth wouldn’t be able to reach the masses unless and until I was above the law,” Khan writes of his motivations for leaving the United States for Yemen. Khan made what he claims was as a surprisingly hassle-free trip through airport security — his only inconvenience, a 30 minute wait for being on a TSA watch list — flying to Sana’a, Yemen. There, he passed time as an English teacher and eventually made his way to the “camps of the mujahidin.”